Gov. Ann Richards once asked Austin writer Edwin "Bud" Shrake to tell her his deep-seated fears, the ones he just couldn't shake. Her longtime companion named two: becoming destitute and making a fool of himself. "Well," the spunky guv said, "you picked a hell of a way to make a living."

Lucky for us the big guy with a gift for clean, hard-line prose stared down his demons to write. And write he has for more than 50 years as sportswriter (about three for The Dallas Morning News), screenwriter, novelist, biographer, playwright and raffish correspondent with literary friends.

Catnip to women, much admired by men, the Fort Worth native cut a wide swath in his hard-living days. His writing, honed on newspaper deadlines, is direct, ironic, sending off splinters of light. To discover him now is to gain a friend for life, one who will make you laugh, snicker and sigh even as shadows are falling.

If you haven't read this sophisticated Texas seeker, there's a wild assemblage of his many kinds of works in Land of the Permanent Wave. Edited by Steven L. Davis (Texas Literary Outlaws), the anthology takes its title from a pungent piece about the author's travels through East Texas with his then-wife in the 1960s.

Inside its flaming orange cover, featuring a rascally Shrake in dark shades, are snatches of his nonfiction and fiction, including some unpublished gems. His candid introductions spritz each entry.

Shrake fans each have a pet. Golf nuts love his haunting novel Billy Boy, about a Colonial Country Club showdown, and the spare but inspirational golf guide Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, the best-selling sports volume in history.

The author's own favorite, written after shaking booze and tobacco for good, is the novel Night Never Falls, about a foreign correspondent trapped with the French at Dien Bien Phu.

Here, too, are "The Once-Forbidding Land," a beautiful, unblinkered look at the Texas Hill Country, from his years at Sports Illustrated, and "The Kennedy Motorcade" from his incendiary novel Strange Peaches, about the moment when the author locked eyes with the smiling president on Lemmon Avenue.

Missing, alas, is anything from the admittedly well-known Penick golf books, the fresh, funny Songwriter screenplay, and the hilarious, prescient novel Limo, co-written with buddy Dan Jenkins, with its great opening line: "It was a hot, sticky night in Barcelona and all the good whores had the summer flu."

Otherwise, An Edwin "Bud" Shrake Reader is another welcome addition to the Southwestern Writers Collection Series.